Gary Klein
22 statements across 3 episodes · 8 bullish · 3 bearish · 2 people on the record · first statement Oct 15, 2019 by Daniel Kahneman · said 3 times in 2 episodes since 2019 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Gary Klein's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Daniel Kahneman (3)
tap a year for its mentions
2025 2 mentions in 1 episode
2019 1 mention in 1 episode
Everything said about Gary Klein, oldest first
Oct 15, 2019 positive
Kahneman: Premortems legitimize team dissent and reveal critical decision loopholes
“And the premortem legitimizes that sort of dissent and that sort of doubt. Not only legitimizes it, you know, it rewards it. And so that's a very good idea. I don't, you know, I don't think that it's going to prevent people from making mistakes, big mistakes, …”
Aug 9, 2022
Aug 9, 2022
Klein: Someone who cannot name past mistakes is not an expert
“If the person says, I can't think of any mistakes. To me, that means this person may be competent, but it certainly is not an expert. Experts are well aware of their mistakes and their mistakes eat at them until they can sort of imagine what I should have done…”
Aug 9, 2022
Klein: Historical performance and tenure do not reliably prove expertise
“I may be an investor and I have a track record of calling the market right in the last five times. And people say, wow, he really knows what he's talking about. But there are lots of people who are trying to predict which way the market is going to go. And som…”
Aug 9, 2022 positive
Klein: A complete mental model requires four distinct components
“My idea of a mental model started out with how something works. And now it includes all four of these components, how it works, what its limitations are, how to work around them, and how to anticipate confusion on the part of people who I'm going to be working…”
Aug 9, 2022
Klein: Evaluate decision-making by probing rationale in simulated scenarios
“How do you evaluate their decision making? You run them through a scenario, see what choices they make, find out what their rationale is, find out the reasons that they're picking one thing over another, and use that to determine if you think that their mental…”
Aug 9, 2022 neutral
Klein: Premortems fail when framed as 'what can go wrong'
“One of the mistakes is that they just frame it wrong from the beginning. They'll say, okay, we should do a pre-mortem. So what can go wrong? It's not an issue of what can go wrong. We're dealing with a crystal ball that has showed that the plan has failed. We …”
Aug 9, 2022 positive
Klein: Aim for individuals to trust you more after encounters than before
“One of his rules of thumb, maybe the most important one for my consideration is he said, whenever he's in an encounter with a civilian, or even with a lawbreaker, he said, I want that person To trust me more at the end of the encounter than at the beginning.”
Aug 9, 2022 positive
Klein: Premortems work by rewarding people for surfacing failure modes
“The way the premortem works is it reverses the usual dynamic of these meetings. Often at the end of a meeting, somebody will say, all right, we're done. We're just about done with the meeting. Does anybody see any problems? Nobody wants to identify a problem. …”
Aug 9, 2022
Klein: Discouraging Immediate Reactions Would Cripple Decision-Making
“Some people say we should discourage people from coming up with immediate reactions, but that's ridiculous, because that's not the way we think, and it would cripple us, so instead you want us to come up with a quick reaction, but If something, if we're wrong,…”
Aug 9, 2022 negative
Klein: Consensus decision-making favors safe options over bold innovation
“And I also don't like consensus decisions because those tend to be, and in other situations, the consensus is fairly risk averse, unlike with the Martian. And people want to have something that everybody can agree with, and you've lose, lost your opportunity F…”
Aug 9, 2022
Klein: Evaluate decisions by reasoning at the time, not just outcome
“Now, some decisions may have been good decisions that didn't work through no fault of the employee, and some may have been bad decisions that worked because the employee got lucky. So you can't just look at the outcome, but you have to look at what was the per…”
Aug 9, 2022 positive
Aug 9, 2022
Klein: Researchers Find Scientists Use 'Knowledge Shields' to Dismiss Anomalies
“But the researchers who have investigated this find that scientists do the same thing. They have something that's called knowledge shields the way all of us do. That, that a variety of techniques for explaining away inconvenient data and anomalies.”
Aug 9, 2022 negative
Klein: Debiasing fails because cognitive biases are effective learned heuristics
“I know my sense from the literature is that there's been little of any success in de-biasing people, and I think that's a good thing because the biases that get identified Are essentially related to the heuristics that we've learned and are part of the experie…”
Aug 9, 2022 negative
Aug 9, 2022 positive
Klein: Experts Relish Improvisation When Standard Routines Fail
“If they're doing the same job over and over again, they get bored, and then something happens, and they can't use the same routines, and the journeyman, they get really frustrated like that. It's not supposed to happen. I don't know. Who do I call? And the exp…”
Aug 9, 2022
Klein: Corporate Reward Structures Favor Avoiding Mistakes Over Fostering Insights
“If you have an idea that's a bad idea and you make a mistake, that's the down arrow. Everybody can see it, right? It's public. So there's a lot of cost for making a mistake. If you fail to make an insight, nobody will know. So the reward structure is always fa…”
Aug 9, 2022
Aug 9, 2022
Gary Klein: When Options Are Balanced, Pick Arbitrarily Instead of Agonizing
“These are the hardest decisions people ever wrestle with. And the paradox is if the advantages and disadvantages of the two options are almost perfectly balanced, it doesn't matter which one we pick. And yet we will spend days, weeks going around in a funk. Wh…”
Aug 9, 2022 positive
Klein: Breaking Through Skill Plateaus Requires Unlearning Outdated Beliefs
“My speculation working with a colleague, Holly Baxter, is that people get up to a certain level of performance And then they start to stagnate and they start to plateau. And people who break through and move to the next level are the ones who engage in unlearn…”
Jul 22, 2025 positive
Kahneman: Premortems legitimize and reward dissent in group decision-making
“It's beautiful because when people are coming close to a decision, it becomes Difficult to raise doubts or to raise questions. People who are slowing the group down when the group is nearing a decision are procedures really, you know, it's annoying, you know, …”